Portals can provide access to information networks and/or sets of services through the World Wide Web and other computer networks. Portals can provide a single point of access to data and applications, making them valuable to developers, businesses, and consumers alike. A portal can present a unified and personalized view of enterprise information to employees, customers, and business partners. In many implementations, portal applications can include web application views designed as a portal.
Portals are capable of presenting multiple web application views within a single web interface. In addition to regular web content that can appear in a portal, portals provide the ability to display portlets (self-contained applications or content) in a single web interface. Portals can also support multiple pages with menu-based or custom navigation for accessing the individualized content and portlets for each page.
The generation of portals, however, can be an involved and cumbersome process that requires considerable development time and effort. In order to create a working portal, an application developer may have to create: a portal definition such as a file including Extensible Markup Language (“XML”); portlet definition files for any portlets associated with the portal; java server pages (“JSPs”); web application descriptors; images such as graphics interchange format files (“GIFs”); deployment descriptors, configuration files, the java archive files (“JAR”) that contain the logic and formatting instructions for the portal application; and any other files necessary for the desired portal application. In addition, the developer may have to determine the appropriate directories in which to place each file and then manually move files to appropriate directories.